Suffolk resident comes to terms with memories

Most of us flipped on the television when we heard the story. Jim Reynolds looked out his window when he heard the explosion.

"It was all glass," Reynolds said of the outer wall of his 18th-floor room in the Millennium Hilton in New York City. "And your view directly out the window is the twin towers. From the window of my hotel to the tower, it's maybe 400, 500 feet."

Reynolds, president of the Community Electric Co-Operative in Windsor, stared up 70 stories and tried to make sense of what he was seeing: intense orange flames and black smoke, chunks of metal screaming toward the ground. He acted on a standard modern instinct: He turned on CNN. Nothing.

He thought that it was a terrorist act, a bomb. When he made it to the lobby and heard that an airplane had hit the tower, everyone assumed that it was an accident. Reynolds and six others decided that they would go on with their reason for being there, a 9 a.m. Wall Street meeting and a $250 million bond sale. That plan quickly fell apart.

"Then the second plane hits," Reynolds said. "And when the second plane hits, no one has to tell you to take cover. That was so tremendous of an explosion, literally everyone in the lobby jumped for cover. You didn't know what was happening. You thought it could be the first tower collapsing."

As they moved out of the area, Reynolds and his Richmond friend Todd Brickhouse got separated from the rest of their business group. "The feeling was definitely panic," he said.

Amid the panic, a snow shower of business papers and a hysterical mass of people in the streets, Reynolds and Brickhouse made a calm decision: get far away from the towers, avoid masses of people and get off Manhattan Island.

Reynolds made it to Battery Park on the West Side and caught a boat ride across the Hudson River to New Jersey but not before he watched the towers collapse. He and the crowd at Battery Park choked on the dust.

He walked, took a bus, then a train to Philadelphia. There, he rented a car, and he and Brickhouse drove back to Richmond by 10 on the night of the 11th. By the 12th, he was back at work in his office in Windsor.

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"It remains, in my mind, as if it happened yesterday," Reynolds said, grappling with what it means to have witnessed the World Trade Center attacks.

Reynolds doesn't hold back from telling people - once they ask - about what it was like to be there, covered in soot, fraught with fear. Simply retelling the story - especially in the days immediately after, he said - helped him come to terms with it, to realize that it did happen.

The continual replay of disaster footage on television doesn't faze him, he said. It's too dull, compared with his recollections.

"There are certain things that are rather gory that you don't forget," Reynolds said. "Seeing people jump. When you see one, two, three, even five people at a time, clutching each other as they jump. Because the flames are so intense, and there's nowhere to go. A moment or two of that, and there's nothing we could do but walk away."

When he thinks about that day, he thinks about fate, luck and his good fortune.

"I've been to New York maybe six times in my life," he said. "One- or two-night trips - fly in, fly out. And this happens the day I'm there."

He returned safely to his wife, Toni, and three children - Amy, 26; Jimmy, 24; and Brittany, 15. He thinks about what could have happened if he hadn't moved out of the area so quickly. "We're pretty doggoned lucky," he said.

If Sept. 11 has changed him, it's not by haunting him with memories but by forcing him to think about the forces that caused it.

"If we don't begin to see the world with more empathy and acceptance of others," Reynolds said, "and if we are never willing to accept someone else fully - whoever he is, no matter his religious beliefs - then we will be constantly besieged by war and terrorist acts, whether carried out by Christians or Muslims or atheists."